Po'pay and the Revolt of 1680

On August tenth, sixteen eighty, runners fanned out across the high desert of New Mexico carrying a message. The message was not written down. The coordination it carried had no equivalent in colonial North America.

A Tewa religious leader named Po'pay had organized what Spanish colonial officials later described, with some confusion, as a simultaneous uprising. What it actually was: nineteen Pueblo nations, speaking at least five separate and mutually unintelligible languages, had agreed on a date. They had agreed on a signal. They had agreed on the terms of what came next.

Po'pay came from Ohkay Owingeh, which the Spanish called San Juan Pueblo and which sits at the junction of the Rio Grande and the Rio Chama, thirty miles north of Santa Fe. He had been arrested by Spanish colonial authorities five years earlier, in sixteen seventy-five, along with forty-six other Pueblo religious leaders, charged with practicing Indigenous ceremony. He was publicly flogged in the plaza of Santa Fe. He was released. He spent the next five years coordinating the response.

The coordination system is preserved in Pueblo oral tradition. Neither the Eight Northern Pueblos Council nor the National Park Service has published the precise mechanics of the runner-messaging network in written form. What the historical record confirms is the outcome: on August tenth, sixteen eighty, approximately two thousand Spanish colonists were expelled from the colony of New Mexico. Approximately four hundred of them died. The rest fled south to El Paso del Norte. The Palace of the Governors, which Spanish colonial governors had occupied since sixteen ten, became the seat of Pueblo governance.

No other Indigenous uprising in what is now the United States held its territory for twelve years. The Spanish did not return until September sixteen ninety-two, under Governor Diego de Vargas. The reconquest that followed was negotiated differently than the original colonization, with formal, if imperfect, recognition of Pueblo land rights and a reduction of the most extreme forced-labor practices.

Po'pay governed from the Palace of the Governors until his death around sixteen ninety-two. New Mexico placed a statue of him in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall in two thousand five. He remains the only Indigenous historical figure to represent a state in that collection.

The building at the head of the Santa Fe Plaza has been continuously occupied, by successive governments, for four hundred and fifteen years. During twelve of those years, its occupants had expelled the people who built it.